In recent years, the storage capacities of recording media, such as hard disks and DVDs have been increased. Accordingly, recording/playback apparatuses that use such recording media for recording video/audio data of contents, such as TV programs, have been developed and come into wide use. As the transition to the digital terrestrial broadcasting progresses, it is likely that the bit rate of the streams increases and the demand for increasing the capacities of recording media becomes greater. In the case of particularly using a hard disk as a recording medium in an apparatus, it is more common to use plural low-cost middle-capacity hard disks than to use a large-capacity hard disk.
To perform playback or recording with a recording medium such as a hard disk and a DVD, it is necessary to start driving the spindle motor in advance. However, if plural hard disks are provided as recording media and the spindle motors of the hard disks are always being driven, a considerable amount of electrical power is required. On the other hand, if the spindle motor is driven each time an access to the hard disk is required, it requires quite a long time before the spindle motor drives and the hard disk becomes accessible. As a result, it might happen at playback that data to be transmitted to the decoder can not be read in time. This results in interruptions of the playback. Also, at recording, it might happen that the buffer used for storing data to be recorded on the hard disk overflows. This results in partial missing of the recorded data.
To solve such problems, Patent Document 1 identified below discloses an invention that has become part of the public domain.
The Patent Document 1 discloses a recording/playback apparatus that is equipped with a hard disk and a semiconductor recording device. According to this disclosure, when recording video/audio data on the hard disk, the recording/playback apparatus records the top part of the video/audio data on the semiconductor recording device while recording all the video/audio data on the hard disk. When playing back the video/audio data, the recording/playback apparatus first plays back the top part of the video/audio data recorded on the semiconductor recording device, and starts driving the spindle motor of the hard disk during the playback. Then, the recording/playback apparatus plays back the rest of the video/audio data from the hard disk. As a result, it is possible to prevent delay of the playback.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Application Publication No. 2005-302276